Category Archives: northtexasfll

Here’s an annotated video of our team’s 555 point run at the North Texas FLL Regional Championship, held on February 14, 2015 at Parish Episcopal School in Dallas and sponsored by the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. Matthew was the driver for this round, with Walter running attachments.

If you’re a new coach or a rookie team, we welcome you. We know you probably have a lot of questions and uncertainty about FLL, and we’re glad to help wherever we can. In previous years, our team maintained a resources page with information about North Texas FLL events. This year we’re moving our resources to roboplex.org/fll , and we encourage all visitors to join us there.

Be sure to also join the North Texas FLL Google Group, as there are often many helpful announcements and discussions taking place there, and it’s an excellent place to ask questions.

Coach Patrick was a referee at the UT-Dallas qualifier on Dec 6, and he started taking photos of Reverse Engineering models that were especially nice or interesting. We’re now creating a gallery of reverse engineering models. If you’d like to add your model to our gallery, just send a photo to pmichaud@pobox.com .

Unfortunately Patrick didn’t record the team numbers for the airplane and duck models; if you recognize this as yours and would like credit, please let us know.

If you missed yesterday’s clinics at UT-Dallas, you can still attend the clinics on October 25th at UME Preparatory Academy. We’re also asking coaches and attendees to please fill out the pre-clinic survey at http://goo.gl/forms/ciYDA3UkSi , so we have an idea of how many are attending and what would be best to cover.

Also, several people at yesterday’s clinic were asking about the motorcycle wheels and the wheels used on our robot; links for these wheels are now available on our Resources Page.

We create and maintain the resources page so that all of the announcements and files that come up over the season are available to us in one place. But it’s also useful for others and we like to share resources freely. If you think of anything else that would be helpful to keep on the page, please let us know!

Be sure to also join the North Texas FLL Google Group, as there are often many helpful announcements and discussions taking place there, and it’s an excellent place to ask questions.

On this page we keep links and references to various North Texas FIRST LEGO League competition resources, to make them easy for us and others to locate quickly later. Where possible we try to link directly to official pages and notifications; but we’re definitely not the official source for any of this. If in doubt — double check the official sources!

Feel free to suggest additional links or resources that should appear here, or to let us know of errors or things that shouldn’t be here.

What are the Coach Clinics?

These are HIGHLY RECOMMENDED workshops held on Saturdays throughout September and October where different topics will be covered each session (see above for descriptions).

Clinics are lead by experts in everything FLL, including team management, robot building and programming, and how to do what your team will need to do to participate in official events.

One or two coaches/mentors and one team member are allowed to attend the clinics. If possible, the team member should be a key member who is responsible for what topic is being covered in the session he/she is attending.

Other items:

What is Coach Kickoff?

(from Kristi Cantu @ Perot Museum)

These are introductory meetings/presentations where we go over everything you’ll need to know about participating in FLL this season.

There are two Coach Kickoffs–each coach/mentor only needs to go to one, AND IT DOESN’T MATTER WHICH ONE. ROOKIE AND VETERAN COACHES ARE WELCOME AT BOTH (disregard the earlier info about separate ones).

These are HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, especially for new coaches/mentors.

We will go over exactly how the events and competitions run (rules, policies, what to expect), and there will be Robot Game tables and fields set up with our awesome experts there to explain the Robot Game missions and rules.

It’s a great opportunity to meet the North Texas FLL community, get your questions answered in person, and figure out exactly what will be happening for us this season…also we’ll feed you…

Here’s an annotated video of our team’s 550 point run at the FIRST LEGO League 2014 World Festival, which was good enough to earn 6th place in the Robot Game. Veronica was the lead driver for this round, with Anthony handling attachments.

We were very pleased with the team’s and robot’s performance at the World Festival. The team’s goal for the season was to create a robot that performed consistently well in the robot game, and at the World Festival all robot runs in practice and competition were over 500 points (scores were 562, 562, 520, 550, and 520). Republic of Pi was the only team to score over 500 on every official robot run at the World Festival.

Republic of Pi participated at the 2013 North Texas FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Regional Championship tournament at the Hockaday School on February 1, 2014. They won the 1st Place Champion’s Award and 1st Place in Robot Performance — the highest awards in FIRST LEGO League at the regional level.

The team now moves on to compete in the FLL World Festival in St. Louis on April 23-26. Thank you to the Perot Museum and everyone in the North Texas Region that volunteered and competed to put together a great regional contest!